Using a combination of ground state quantum Monte-Carlo and finite size scaling techniques, we perform a systematic study of the effect of Coulomb interaction on the localisation length of a disordered two-dimensional electron gas. We find that correlations delocalise the 2D system. In the absence of valley degeneracy (as in GaAs heterostructures), this delocalization effect corresponds to a finite increase of the localization length. The delocalisation is much more dramatic in the presence of valley degeneracy (as in Si MOSFETSs) where the localization length increases drastically. Our results suggest that a rather simple mechanism can account for the main features of the metallic behaviour observed in high mobility Si MOSFETs. Our findings support the claim that this behaviour is indeed a genuine effect of the presence of electron-electron interactions, yet that the system is not a ``true'' metal in the thermodynamic sense.
We consider the problem of many-body localisation on Fock space, focussing on the essential features of the Hamiltonian which stabilise a localised phase. Any many-body Hamiltonian has a canonical representation as a disordered tight-binding model on the Fock-space graph. The underlying physics is however fundamentally different from that of conventional Anderson localisation on high-dimensional graphs because the Fock-space graph possesses non-trivial correlations. These correlations are shown to lie at the heart of whether or not a stable many-body localised phase can be sustained in the the…
Many-body localisation is studied in a disordered quantum spin-1/2 chain with long-ranged power-law interactions, and distinct power-law exponents for interactions between longitudinal and transverse spin components. Using a self-consistent mean-field theory centring on the local propagator in Fock space and its associated self-energy, a localisation phase diagram is obtained as a function of the power-law exponents and the disorder strength of the random fields acting on longitudinal spin-components. Analytical results are corroborated using the well-studied and complementary numerical diagno…
It is believed, that a disordered one-dimensional (1D) wire with coherent electronic conduction is an insulator with the mean resistance <ρ> \simeq e^{2L/ξ} and resistance dispersion Δ_ρ \simeq e^{L/ξ}, where L is the wire length and ξis the electron localisation length. Here we show that this 1D insulator undergoes at full coherence the crossover to a 1D "metal", caused by thermal smearing and resonant tunnelling. As a result, Δ_ρ is smaller than unity and tends to be L/ξ- independent, while <ρ> grows with L/ξfirst nearly linearly and then polynomially, manifesting the so-called medium locali…
The quantum motion of $N$ coupled kicked rotors is mapped to an interacting $N$-particle Anderson-Aubry-Andr$é$ tight-binding problem supporting many-body localised (MBL) phases. Interactions in configuration space are known to be insufficient for destroying Anderson localisation in a system in the MBL phase. The mapping we establish here predicts that a similar effect takes place in momentum space and determines the quantum dynamics of the coupled kicked rotors. Due to the boundedness of the Floquet quasi-energy spectrum there exists limitations on the interacting lattice models that can be m…
We construct and solve a classical percolation model with a phase transition that we argue acts as a proxy for the quantum many-body localisation transition. The classical model is defined on a graph in the Fock space of a disordered, interacting quantum spin chain, using a convenient choice of basis. Edges of the graph represent matrix elements of the spin Hamiltonian between pairs of basis states that are expected to hybridise strongly. At weak disorder, all nodes are connected, forming a single cluster. Many separate clusters appear above a critical disorder strength, each typically having …
We observe the onset of non-ergodicity from ballistic propagation of a two-body bound state in an interacting discrete-time quantum walk (DTQW) due to time-dependent disorder in the interaction. The effect of the disorder on the two-body state can be interpreted as Anderson-type localisation in a projected DTQW, but without saturation of entanglement entropy. We characterise the two-body localisation in terms of the rate of growth of entanglement entropy and compute the localisation length. We find indications for two distinct growth laws for the entanglement: a logarithmic law in the delocali…
We present a detailed study of the quantum site percolation problem on simple cubic lattices, thereby focussing on the statistics of the local density of states and the spatial structure of the single particle wavefunctions. Using the Kernel Polynomial Method we refine previous studies of the metal-insulator transition and demonstrate the non-monotonic energy dependence of the quantum percolation threshold. Remarkably, the data indicates a ``fragmentation'' of the spectrum into extended and localised states. In addition, the observation of a chequerboard-like structure of the wavefunctions at …
The phenomenon of many-body localisation received a lot of attention recently, both for its implications in condensed-matter physics of allowing systems to be an insulator even at non-zero temperature as well as in the context of the foundations of quantum statistical mechanics, providing examples of systems showing the absence of thermalisation following out-of-equilibrium dynamics. In this work, we establish a novel link between dynamical properties - the absence of a group velocity and transport - with entanglement properties of individual eigenvectors. Using Lieb-Robinson bounds and filter…
We present a detailed analysis of the length- and timescales needed to approach the critical region of MBL from the delocalised phase, studying both eigenstates and the time evolution of an initial state. For the eigenstates we show that in the delocalised region there is a single length, which is a function of disorder strength, controlling the finite-size flow. Small systems look localised, and only for larger systems do resonances develop which restore ergodicity in the form of the eigenstate thermalisation hypothesis. For the transport properties, we study the time necessary to transport a…
A recent experiment by P. Bordia et al. (Periodically Driving a Many Body Localized Quantum System, Nat Phys, Jan 2017) has demonstrated that periodically modulating the potential of a localised many-body quantum system described by the Aubry-André Hamiltonian with on-site interactions can lead to a many-body localisation-delocalisation transition, provided the modulation amplitude is big enough. Here, we consider the noninteracting counterpart of that model in order to explore its phase diagram as a function of the strength of the disordered potential, the driving frequency and its amplitude.…
We study the effect of magnetic scattering on transport in a system with strong structural disorder, using exact finite size calculation of the low frequency optical conductivity. At weak electron-spin coupling spin disorder leads to a decrease in resistivity by weakening the quantum interference precursors to Anderson localisation. However, at strong electron-spin coupling, the double exchange limit, magnetic scattering increases the effective disorder, sharply increasing the resistivity. We illustrate the several unusual transport regimes in this strong disorder problem, identify a re-entran…
We explore the Fock-space structure of eigenstates across the many-body localisation (MBL) transition in a disordered, interacting quantum spin-1/2 chain. Eigenstate expectation values of spatially local observables, which distinguish an MBL phase from an ergodic one, can be represented in terms of eigenstate amplitudes on the Fock space. Motivated by this, we introduce and study spatial correlations on the Fock space. From these, a correlation length emerges, which is found to vary discontinuously across the MBL transition; and is intimately connected to the discontinuous jump in the multifra…
It is widely believed that many-body localisation in one dimension is fragile and can be easily destroyed by thermal inclusions, however there are still many open questions regarding the stability of the localised phase and under what conditions it breaks down. Here I construct models with dilute disorder, which interpolate between translationally invariant and fully random models, in order to study the breakdown of localisation. This opens up the possibility to controllably increase the density of thermal regions and examine the breakdown of localisation as this density is increased. At stron…
In this paper, we review the recent activity of our group on the study of disorder effects on systems displaying phase coherence. These studies have focused on both the electronic transport through mesoscopic metallic spin glasses, and cold atomic gases trapped in a disordered potential.
Many-body localisation in interacting quantum systems can be cast as a disordered hopping problem on the underlying Fock-space graph. A crucial feature of the effective Fock-space disorder is that the Fock-space site energies are strongly correlated -- maximally so for sites separated by a finite distance on the graph. Motivated by this, and to understand the effect of such correlations more fundamentally, we study Anderson localisation on Cayley trees and random regular graphs, with maximally correlated disorder. Since such correlations suppress short distance fluctuations in the disorder pot…
We study classical percolation models in Fock space as proxies for the quantum many-body localisation (MBL) transition. Percolation rules are defined for two models of disordered quantum spin-chains using their microscopic quantum Hamiltonians and the topologies of the associated Fock-space graphs. The percolation transition is revealed by the statistics of Fock-space cluster sizes, obtained by exact enumeration for finite-sized systems. As a function of disorder strength, the typical cluster size shows a transition from a volume law in Fock space to sub-volume law, directly analogous to the b…
We study a tight binding model including both on site disorder and coupling of the electrons to randomly oriented magnetic moments. The transport properties are calculated via the Kubo-Greenwood scheme, using the exact eigenstates of the disordered system and large system size extrapolation of the low frequency optical conductivity. We first benchmark our method in the model with only structural disorder and then use it to map out the transport regimes and metal- insulator transitions in problems involving (i) scattering from random magnetic moments, and (ii) the combined effect of structural …
While the scaling of entanglement in a quantum system can be used to distinguish many-body quantum phases, it is usually hard to quantify the amount of entanglement in mixed states of open quantum systems, while measuring entanglement experimentally, even for the closed systems, requires in general quantum state tomography. In this work we show how to remedy this situation in system with a fixed or conserved charge, e.g., density or magnetization, due to an emerging relation between quantum correlations and coherence. First, we show how, in these cases, the presence of multipartite entanglemen…
Motivated by the link between Anderson localisation on high-dimensional graphs and many-body localisation, we study the effect of periodic driving on Anderson localisation on random trees. The time dependence is eliminated in favour of an extra dimension, resulting in an extended graph wherein the disorder is correlated along the new dimension. The extra dimension increases the number of paths between any two sites and allows for interference between their amplitudes. We study the localisation problem within the forward scattering approximation (FSA) which we adapt to this extended graph. At l…
Disorder or interactions can turn metals into insulators. One of the simplest settings to study this physics is given by the Falikov-Kimball model, which describes itinerant fermions interacting with a classical Ising background field. Despite the translational invariance of the model, inhomogenous configurations of the background field give rise to effective disorder physics which lead to a rich phase diagram in two (or more) dimensions with finite temperature charge density wave (CDW) transitions and interaction-tuned Anderson versus Mott localized phases. Here, we propose a generalised Fali…
Understanding the metal-insulator transition in disordered many-fermion systems, both with and without interactions, is one of the most challenging and consequential problems in condensed matter physics. In this paper we address this issue from the perspective of the modern theory of the insulating state (MTIS), which has already proven to be effective for band and Mott insulators in clean systems. First we consider noninteracting systems with different types of aperiodic external potentials: uncorrelated disorder (one-dimensional Anderson model), deterministic disorder (Aubry-André Hamiltonia…
Out of equilibrium phases of matter exhibiting order in individual eigenstates, such as many-body localised spin glasses and discrete time crystals, can be characterised by inherently dynamical quantities such as spatiotemporal correlation functions. In this work, we introduce dynamical potentials which act as generating functions for such correlations and capture eigenstate phases and order. These potentials show formal similarities to their equilibrium counterparts, namely thermodynamic potentials. We provide three representative examples: a disordered, many-body localised XXZ chain showing …
We discuss the onset of many body localisation in a one-dimensional system composed of a XXZ quantum spin chain and a Bose-Hubbard model linearly coupled together. We consider two complementary setups depending whether spatial disorder is initially imprinted on spins or on bosons; in both cases, we explore the conditions for the disordered portion of the system to localise by proximity of the other clean half. Assuming that the dynamics of one of the two parts develops on shorter time scales than the other, we can adiabatically eliminate the fast degrees of freedom, and derive an effective ham…
We develop a novel approach to the Anderson localisation problem in a $d$-dimensional disordered sample of dimension $L\times M^{d-1}$. Attaching a perfect lead with the cross-section $M^{d-1}$ to one side of the sample, we derive evolution equations for the scattering matrix and the Wigner-Smith time delay matrix as a function of $L$. Using them one obtains the Fokker-Planck equation for the distribution of the proper delay times and the evolution equation for their density at weak disorder. The latter can be mapped onto a non-linear partial differential equation of the Burgers type, for whic…
We report a careful finite size scaling study of the metal insulator transition in Anderson's model of localisation. We focus on the estimation of the critical exponent $ν$ that describes the divergence of the localisation length. We verify the universality of this critical exponent for three different distributions of the random potential: box, normal and Cauchy. Our results for the critical exponent are consistent with the measured values obtained in experiments on the dynamical localisation transition in the quantum kicked rotor realised in a cold atomic gas.
We analyse quasi-periodically driven quantum systems that can be mapped exactly to periodically driven ones and find Floquet Time Spirals in analogy with spatially incommensurate spiral magnetic states. Generalising the mechanism to many-body systems we discover that a form of discrete time-translation symmetry breaking can also occur in quasi-periodically driven systems. We construct a discrete time quasi-crystal stabilised by many-body localisation. Crucially, it persists also under perturbations that break the equivalence with periodic systems. As such it provides evidence of a stable quasi…
In this paper we present a determinant quantum monte carlo study of the two dimensional Hubbard model with random site disorder. We show that, as in the case of bond disorder, the system undergoes a transition from an Anderson insulating phase to a metallic phase as the onsite repulsion U is increased beyond a critical value U_c. However, there appears to be no sharp signal of this metal-insulator transition in the screened site energies. We observe that, while the system remains metallic for interaction values upto twice U_c, the conductivity is maximal in the metallic phase just beyond U_c, …
Interacting quantum many-body systems are usually expected to thermalise, in the sense that the evolution of local expectation values approach a stationary value resembling a thermal ensemble. This intuition is notably contradicted in systems exhibiting many-body localisation, a phenomenon receiving significant recent attention. One of its most intriguing features is that, in stark contrast to the non-interacting case, entanglement of states grows without limit over time, albeit slowly. In this work, we establish a novel link between quantum information theory and notions of condensed matter, …
Effects of electron correlations on Anderson insulators have been one of the central themes for recent two decades, suggesting that the Anderson insulating phase turns into a novel insulating state referred to as many body localization (MBL). However, the role of spin degrees of freedom in this dynamical phase transition still remains unclarified as a function of the interaction strength. In this study, we perform real-space spin-resolved Hartree-Fock-Anderson simulations to investigate metal-insulator transitions above a critical disorder strength in three spatial dimensions, where all single…
We study a one-dimensional (1d) XXZ spin-chain in a random field on the metallic side of the many-body localization transition by level statistics. For a fixed interaction, and intermediate disorder below the many-body localization transition, we find that, asymptotically, the number variance grows faster than linear with a disorder dependent exponent. This is consistent with the existence of an anomlaous Thouless energy in the spectrum. In non-interacting disordered metals this is an energy scale related to the typical time for a particle to diffuse across the sample. In the interacting case …
We study analytically the local density of states in a disordered normal-metal wire at ballistic distance to a superconductor. Our calculation is based on a scattering-matrix approach, which concerns for wave-function localisation in the normal metal, and extends beyond the conventional semiclassical theory based on Usadel and Eilenberger equations. We also analyse how a finite transparency of the NS interface modifies the spectral proximity effect and demonstrate that our results agree in the dirty diffusive limit with those obtained from the Usadel equation.
We develop a mean-field theory of the metallic phase near the many-body localization (MBL) transition, using the observation that a system near the MBL transition should become an increasingly slow heat bath for its constituent parts. As a first step, we consider the properties of a many-body localized system coupled to a generic ergodic bath whose characteristic dynamical timescales are much slower than those of the system. As we discuss, a wide range of experimentally relevant systems fall into this class; we argue that relaxation in these systems is dominated by collective many-particle rea…
The breaking of ergodicity in isolated quantum systems with a single-particle mobility edge is an intriguing subject that has not yet been fully understood. In particular, whether a nonergodic but metallic phase exists or not in the presence of a one-dimensional quasiperiodic potential is currently under active debate. In this Letter, we develop a neural-network-based approach to investigate the existence of this nonergodic metallic phase in a prototype model using many-body entanglement spectra as the sole diagnostic. We find that such a method identifies with high confidence the existence of…
It is now possible to study experimentally the combined effect of disorder and interactions in cold atom physics. Motivated by these developments we investigate the dynamics around the metal-insulator transition (MIT) in a one-dimensional (1D) Fermi gas with short-range interactions in a quasiperiodic potential by the time-dependent density-matrix renormalization group (tDMRG) technique. By tuning disorder and interactions we study the MIT from the weakly to the strongly interacting limit. The MIT is not universal as time evolution, well described by a process of anomalous diffusion, depends q…
The insulating state of matter can be probed by means of a ground state geometrical marker, which is closely related to the modern theory of polarization (based on a Berry phase). In the present work we show that this marker can be applied to determine the metal-insulator transition in disordered systems. In particular, for non-interacting systems the geometrical marker can be obtained from the configurational average of the norm-squared one-body density matrix, which can be calculated within open as well as periodic boundary conditions. This is in sharp contrast to a classification based on t…
We introduce a two-dimensional generalisation of the quasiperiodic Aubry-André model. Even though this model exhibits the same duality relation as the one-dimensional version, its localisation properties are found to be substantially more complex. In particular, partially extended single-particle states appear for arbitrarily strong quasiperiodic modulation. They are concentrated on a network of low-disorder lattice lines, while the rest of the lattice hosts localised states. This spatial separation protects the localised states from delocalisation, so no mobility edge emerges in the spectrum.…
We review our recent results on Anderson localization in systems of two interacting particles coupled by contact interactions. Based on an exact mapping to an effective single-particle problem, we numerically investigate the occurrence of metal-insulator phase transitions for the pair in two- (2D) and three-dimensional (3D) disordered lattices. In two dimensions, we find that interactions cause an exponential enhancement of the pair localization length with respect to its single-particle counterpart, but do not induce a delocalization transition. In particular we show that previous claims of 2…
We review selected advances in the theoretical understanding of complex quantum many-body systems with regard to emergent notions of quantum statistical mechanics. We cover topics such as equilibration and thermalisation in pure state statistical mechanics, the eigenstate thermalisation hypothesis, the equivalence of ensembles, non-equilibration dynamics following global and local quenches as well as ramps. We also address initial state independence, absence of thermalisation, and many-body localisation. We elucidate the role played by key concepts for these phenomena, such as Lieb-Robinson bo…
